In the fields of history or economics the vital writers may be half
absorbed
and super- seded before being known to more than three hundred readers.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
Rip van Wendell Willkie has yet heard of the Europe now here.
At any rate he hadn't heard about our Europe a year ago, when writing for that last and lowest of all periodicals, The AilanXic Monthly.
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
***
It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary. I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr. Morgenthau bought the ten billion of gold from, perhaps some Oriental will have the ingenuity and patience to start finding out. No one would be more delighted by full and detailed information on this point than would your present correspondent. I havebeenthrougheightvolumesofU. S. Treasuryreportsbuttheymerely say how much, never from whom.
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
The radio this morning (July 17) announced fusion of Oriental and Occidental cultures as part of the new Japanese program. Hardshell con- servatives will fear a general discoloration of culture, the sudden accept- ance of the faults of both cultures, such, indeed, as Fenollosa found im- minent years ago and withstood. A serious fusion means rigorous selection of the best works of both hemispheres and an historiography that shall give the most pregnant facts with greatest clarity of definition.
I can, I believe, claim something like seniority, or at any rate a long diligence in the search for the former. At fifteen I started an examination of international literature for my own needs. And from 1910 onward there is
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printedrecordofmyresults,howeverimperfect. I havehadalittlecol- laboration. Eliot hov^ever gave up his Sanskrit. Bunting learned to write a beautiful Persian hand. Aldington remained inside the language groups I had examined. Prof. Breasted thought my idea of a quarterly publication of such results of American research as attained value as literature, that is such as had more than specialist's philological interest, was "a dream floating above the heads of the people. " By which he meant the American University system wherein he held very high status as Assyriologist. I see no reason for Japan's taking over the stupidities and flat failures of Amer- ican scholarship. Tokyo has the liveliest magazine of young letters in the world (VOU). New York once had it, that was twenty years ago. Paris often had it before then. Editorial Yunque of Barcelona has just started a very good bilingual series of poets (Poesia en la Mano) beginning with J. R. Masoliver's excellent translations from Dante, Spanish text facing the origi- nal.
If I recommend eight volumes of my own essays and anthologies to the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai as a starting point, it is not, as might be sup- posed,fromimmodesty,butsimplybecauseI donotknowofanyother30 years or 40 years persistent effort to sort out the Occidental books most worth attention. There are encyclopedias, compilations giving names of ALL the known writings, etc. , but not attempts to show the best books in relation to each other.
The very great labors of the Leo Frobenius Institute cover a different field. Your universities will of course take note of them.
The hang-together of art and the economic system is not yet very generally understood. I keep insisting that an "epic is a poem containing history. " That may explain why epic poets need to know economics. It does not touch the lyric writers so closely. However, a "fusion or union of cultures" implies a mutual regard for two historiographies. Here your universities can save their students a great deal of time by importing Brooks Adams' The Law of CiviJization and Decay and The New Empire.
I think, in fact, that you might start your study of our new historiogra- phy from those books, though to understand American cycles they must be amplified by brief compendia of the writing of the American founders, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, and by a narrative containing facts which I, personally, have found in Overholser, Woodward, Beard, Bowers, and not (oh very emphatically not) in the text books used in American beaneries.
I cannot condense four of the essential factors further than I have already done in my "Introductory Text-book" offered herewith.
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Introductory Text-book [In Four Chapters]
Chap. 1. "All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor and virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. "--John Adams.
Chap. 2. ". . . and if the national bills issued, be bottomed (as is indispens- able] on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no inter- est on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to everyone of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them. " --Thomas Jefferson (1816, letter to Crawford).
Chap. 3. ". . . and gave to the people of this Republic the greatest blessing THEY EVER HAD--THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS. "--Abraham Lincolu.
Chap. 4. "The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures. " Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Depart- ment, Section 8, p. 5. Done in the convention by the unanimous consent of the States, 7th September, 1787, and of the Independence of the United States the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names. --GeorgeWashington,PresidentandDeputyfromVirginia.
This "text" was followed by a half page of notes and bibliography. Thus:
The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignor- ance mentioned in my first quotation. Of the three preceding cita- tions, Lincoln's has become the text of Willis Overholser's recent History of Money in the U. S. ; the first citation was taken as opening text by Jerry Voorhis in his speech in the House of Representatives June 6, 1938; and the passage from Jefferson is the nucleus of my Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
Douglas' proposals are a subhead under the main idea in Lin- coln's sentence; Gesell's "invention" is a special case under Jeffer- son's general law. I have done my best to make simple summaries and clear definitions in various books and pamphlets and recommend as introductory study, apart from C. H. Douglas' Economic Democracy and Gesell's Natural Economic Order, Chris. HoUis' Two Nations, McNair Wilson's Promise to Pay, Larraiiaga's Gold, Glut and Govern- ment and M. Butchart's compendium of three centuries' thought, that is an anthology of what has been said, in Money. (Originally pub- lished by Nott. )
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There again I have nothing to retract. I left copies of the above work with a number of senators and congressmen last year in Washington, also with a few historians. The more they knew already, the more nearly saw the bearing of my four chapters. I doubt if anyone can further, or to advantage condense, the thought of John Adams than I have in Cantos 62/71, and I have made a start on Jefferson in my Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Both of which volumes can be explained. There is no reason for someone in Tokyo refraining from issuing a commentary, but I doubt if an adequate history of the U. S. can be written without including the essential ideas which I have there set together. The compendia of histoire morale contempomine made by Remy de Gourmont and Henry James, I have at least indicated in my Make it New.
At this point I would offer a word of warning to Japanese alumni of American, or other Occidental universities. With the exception of Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut in Frankfurt, our universities are not, they most emphatically are not, in the foreguard of Western thought. There is a time lag of 20, 40 or 60 years in what they teach in economics, history and literature. They may be more lively in departments of material science. At any rate most of their Japanese alumni were taught ideas belonging to Western decadence. And that decadence was nowhere more notable than in Western tendency to erect museums rather than temples.
Now the museum is all very well in its way. The juvenile student can see bits and pieces of what has been achieved in the past, which may keep him from narrow provincialism both of place and of time.
In the study of comparative literature, T. S. Eliot has acutely observed that, "existing masterworks constitute a plenum, whereof the divers parts have inter-related proportions and values. The relations of extant works are modified by new work that is really new. "
It is also true that the real writers of any epoch collaborate, sometimes consciously and voluntarily, sometimes unconsciously and even against their own will.
Yeats and I collaborated voluntarily. Yeats and F. M. (Hueffer) Ford involuntarily. Cummings is possibly unconscious of collaboration, etc. However, a museum is made up of fragments. An attempt to present the literature of a country or continent is bound to appear fragmentary or at least made up of heteroclite matter of different degrees of importance. Even more so when we come to translated literature. There is no uniform merit in translations, any more than in works. One nation may have an epic. An- other a set of plays. But one dimension is common to all masterworks,
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namely, they contain the quintessence of racial quality. I have seen Villon in Paris 500 years after his lines were written.
I have seen Boccaccio and Goldoni in Italy, and it is commonplace that "London is full of Dickens. " By which laconic phrases one means that the "news" printed by these authors is still the event of the day in their countries.
Whatever I have compiled either in essays or in anthologies has been in an attempt to set together maxima of achievement, that is, work in which at least some of the qualities of writing and concept have attained the highest known degree. And my results are I think largely confirmed by the findings of England's most distinguished resident critic, T. S. Eliot (born American). And to a certain extent I think Yeats and F. M. Ford would have agreed with us, however long it may take the literary bureaucracies and the book trade to admit it. In several cases even the book-trade has had to give way 20 or 25 years after the fact.
I am therefore recommending my own finding re comparative litera- ture. I am recommending Brooks Adams and subsequent "new" economists in the field of history. I have elsewhere cited various other compendia. Germany is talking of Karl von Stein and of Ruhland instead of Marx. The thought of an epoch does not present itself in all departments. La Tour du Pin, Fabre, Frazer, Burbank, may seem names picked up at hazard. Strictly scientific names are world-known--it is only when you get to the border- line between material (practical) science and culture that the vital writers may lie hidden for half a century before coming into their own.
In the fields of history or economics the vital writers may be half absorbed and super- seded before being known to more than three hundred readers. After which they crop up again later as "sources," the "source" for practical purposes having very little importance save for retrospective scholars, very little, that is, in proportion to the immense importance of getting the right solu- tion, whether for an anti-tubercular serum, or for an economic (monetary) process.
John Adams remarked that "very few people have the chance to choose their system of government. " It is extremely difficult to make a thorough reform of studies that have become fixed or waterlogged through a century or more of university habit. There is, on the other hand, a grand chance of effecting an up-to-date system, if you deliberately set out to present a relatively unexplored foreign culture, and can do so without superstitions, at any rate looking clearly at definite facts either established or provable, and not caring a hang whether these facts have been acceptable to the controllers of the educational [videlicet mis-educational or obfuscatory)
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system in the countries which you elect to investigate.
If Japan can produce a better, that is clearer and more incisive, set of
brochures showing the real thought of the founders of America's social form, than now exists in America, so much the greater your glory. The best and most revolutionary book on Botticelli was brought out by one of your citizens. It was, or at least appeared to me to be, extremely original in its treatment of Botticelli's details as comparable with Oriental treatments. The impartial and alien eye really saw what the familiar native eye had taken for granted. So much for suggested imports to Japan. When it comes to exports, we in the Occident wonder whether a Japanese history exists; or at any rate we fear that no translation of your history exists that will tell us as much of Japan as the tong-kien-kang-mou in De Moyriac de Mailla's version tells us of China. You can't order such works over night. De Mailla's French makes literature of even rather dull passages. Klaproth's Nippon o Dai Itsi Ran does not. It is merely well printed. We want to know more about you. There is a gap between Kagekiyo and the new dredger-plus plywood veneers.
What I really know of Japan I have got from Fenollosa's notes on the Noh and from a handful of "very much over-civilized" young men to whom the Noh was familiar. I cannot suppose this to be a "working knowledge" but I believe it to be a much more "real" knowledge than I should have got by starting at the "practical end" and omitting the fragments vouch-safed to me.
In struggling against enormous odds (meaning financial odds) for a mutual understanding between Japan and the Occident, there is still the danger that a Japanese educated in the U. S. A. might occasionally believe a statement printed in English or American newspapers without first looking carefully at the date line, and name of the agency supplying said news. It cannot be too firmly understood that "some" agencies and newspapers exist mainly, or even wholly, for the purpose of causing the stock markets to wobble, their "political" purposes being a mere cover for this means to putrid profit. I personally feel that some of you might get your European news via the U. S. A. even if as many of your students have gone to Germany
(have they? ) as to the U. S. A. Re which possibility I register the simple statement made to me two years ago by an American publisher. (Parenth- esis: my friends often urge me to be "reasonable. ") The publisher said: "Facts unfavorable to Germany and Italy are news; facts favorable to Italy and Germany are propaganda. "
Against which I set a revealing statement made by Otto Dietrich (Ter- ramare pamphlets no. 13): "The Fiihrer will never create an office unless
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thoroughly convinced of the suitability of the person selected for it. " Perhaps the spiritual descendents and unconscious followers of Con- fucius do him more honor than physical descendents who spend their time
borrowing money.
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
It is impossible to explain contemporary Europe to Japan without a long economic preface, possibly a longer preface than the average reader has patience for. One can roughly indicate the cycle of Occidental infamies since the founding of the Bank of England about 1696 A. D. , via the suppres- sion of paper money in England's American colonies, Cobbett's struggles against the ruin of agriculture in England, industrialization, the ruin of land owners by financial chicane, etc. Suffice it to say that by 1935 we were all fed up with the fall of empires, kingdoms, etc. It was all "old stuff. " Governments had flopped, Austria was, later, a minor collapse, but for over a century and a quarter no man had laid hands on a Rothschild. That item was NEWS with a big "N," but not one European journalist in a hundred had sense to know it, and not one in a thousand could print his perception if he had one. Three hundred million or whatever golden schillings or whatever had gone into Skoda gun works, to make trouble, via Vienna. The reply was the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich.
In one sense history, not merely ideological history, is built out of phrases. It is built out of crystallizations of words into very brief groups, say five, six, or a dozen words. These words become fact. And it is impossible to exaggerate their force, because they cannot come into existence save as proof of a state of understanding. I mean clear understanding, not mere confused apprehension or suspicion.
Hjaimar Schacht made history in 1938: "GeJd, dem keine Ver- brauchsgiiter gegeniiberstehen, ist ja nichts als bedriicktes Papier. " Money that isn't issued against commerciable goods is mere printed paper.
Of course you have to know quite a bit of economics to understand why this sentence is history. Aristotle left certain terms undefined, or at any rate failed to "educate" the Occident and give it a clear (when I say clear, I mean clear) understanding of certain properties of money. Some people contin- ued to think of money as "a universally accepted commodity delivered in measured amounts. " By 640 A. D. the Tang dynasty had got round to using paper money, that is, "an admonition or memorandum of how much the
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187
holder of a certain kind of piece of paper ought to receive in the common market. " The inscription of the Tang notes is essentially the same as that on the ten lire notes in Italy today.
Then came the word "credit. " By 1623 the Sienese Bank, the Monte dei Paschi, had discovered the basis of sound credit, namely the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people. Jefferson knev^^ that it was unnecessary for the U. S. Government to pay two dollars (out of the people's pocket) for every dollar's worth of goods or services delivered to the government. In other words he knew that the state need not rent its own credit from a clique of individuals either American or foreign. Nevertheless even today men go on confusing mandates or orders to deliver what exists and promises to hand over something which may exist next year or the year after. I hope the Japanese student will find two words, one for each of these paper implements, and then refrain from using the two words indifferently and confusedly. If you do this, the Occident will come to sit at your feet.
In the meantime, very informative work is being printed in Italy. I need hardly say that the Axis Powers are the most interesting phenomena in the Occident at this moment, A. D. 1940, year of the Fascist Era xviii. Gerarchia, a monthly magazine founded by Mussolini, contains on p. 345, the month current, the words "probJemi economici, cioe sociali" ("Economic prob- lems, that is to say social").
This also is history. It shows the final penetration of a whole realm of ideas that scattered economists and reformers have been hammering at, and trying to hammer into the public mind for the past 20 years.
There is, indeed, need for a drastic and burning revision of the rubbish taught in all Western universities in the departments of history and eco- nomics. Beginning with Brooks Adams the live thought of half a century runs through authors who are practically excluded--I mean 100% (one hundred per cent) excluded--from the frousty beaneries of the U. S. A. , England, etc. C. H. Douglas, Gesell, Chris. Mollis, McNair Wilson, Over- holser, Larraiiaga, Butchart's compendium, do not figure among the au- thors revealed to our students. An Italian minority, chiefly non- universitaire, I should say, is served by a flock of periodicals which do treat these subjects, often in an "unreadable" manner. However, as you are enjoying a new Italo-Japanese amity society, you might do worse than to fill its reading room with copies of Gerarchia, Rivista deJ Lavoro and publica- tions of this sort. G. Pellizzi is now editing Civilta Fascista, but for brevity's sake it is now possible to make a short cut via Odon Por's Finanza Nuova,
an 80-page summary of new financial ideas (published by Le Monnier, Firenze, 10 lire). Apart from brief restatement of ideas and experiments
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elsewhere, the opening pages of this book give the clearest, and for the first time so far as I know, an adequate statement of the basic differences of theory, and, be it said, the superiorities of Corporate State finance over other proposals and experiments. You cannot understand the new Europe without knowledge of the Italian Fascist revolution and you cannot under- stand that revolution without distinguishing two components in it: the men who, led by Mussolini, regenerated Italy, and the men who, seeing that they could not prevent the regeneration, went along with it for what they could make out of it. Por is distinctly in the first group.
"There had been retouches, but not root changes, because the state intervention did not get down to bed rock, but left the hegemony to preda- tory groups. "
"Autarchy set going as constructive reply to the disintegrating power of money-ocracy, was quickly seen by the latter to be a deadly attack, to be
resisted by all means whatsoever, including war.
". . . . it is at any rate clear that it is not the national aggregates that are
fighting . . . but financial cliques prodding the peoples to fight. "
"Why does Plutocracy fight autarchy? " asks Por.
"In the first place autarchy aims at producing enough goods for national
needs. Money no longer dictates production, but an autarchic-cooperative order does the dictating and money depends on this order for its volume and value. "
I wonder if I can translate that sentence any more clearly? Por goes on:
"In short, the cooperative autarchy abolishes money as merchandise as it has abolished labor as merchandise. "
The Italian word is merce. We might say: Under autarchia neither money nor labor [is] something a clique can sweat profits out of.
"The state having established its rule over the economic system ex- tends this rule over the financial. "
"If you consider that the Bank of England is owned by international financiers who are very hard to identify, and that the British Government has not the power to direct the bank's actions always and everywhere; and that the Banque de France is owned by private capitalists and that many seats on its board of directors are, as it were, hereditary in the plutocratic families: Rothschild, Neuflize, Hottinguer, Wendel, Duchemin, etc. who control the key industries, including the arms business, you can measure the meaning of the reorganization of the Banca d'ltalia. "
"It has become really national because no international interest can get
to work inside it.
. " . .
. " . .
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"The credit of a corporatively organized country is limited to its real riches. "
"These consist in its physical resources in their natural state bettered by modern processes of labor, plus the vital activities of the population and the state of the sciences; of the culture and the intellectual and moral education of the people and the efficient ordering of its institutions. The true wealth is not money. Money is the means accepted to actuate produc-
. "
means to develop the nation's wealth will be provided without having resource to foreign financings. "
All this may seem to be nothing but very plain common sense. Japan may have arrived at this state of sanity and progressed beyond it, for all I know. But you may take it from me that Europe, in general, had not done so by September last year. Even among the bright reformers in various "pro- gressive sectors" such as the U. S. A. (New Deal); Alberta (Social Credit, sabotaged by Monty Norman and the London bleeders); New Zealand (amply reviewed by Por in a later chapter of his Finanza Nuova), some of the essential parts of the mechanism had been omitted.
It is for the above very simple ideas that the Axis Powers are fighting against mouldy superstition. That much you can take as news item, whether you agree with me or not, as to the value of the ideas in themselves.
12 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
Japan is to be congratulated on bringing Mr. Matsuoka to her Foreign Office. Having sat at Geneva he knows just how rotten the League was. He knows to anatomthekindofswindlerwhomadeit. Heknowsthementalitythatwas in it, and is in the Carnegie peace swindle. He knows to what degree the latter sniveling gang of pacifists has refrained from using its endowments honestly and how well it has blocked any research into the real causes of war. And this knowledge of his might be of world use.
Funk's plan is a complete answer to the infamies proposed by Streit and Co. But that doesn't mean that Funk's plan will get any adequate publicity in America. You might think it would . . . you might think my compatriots would be able to see the sense of collaborating in a new world order instead
tion and stimulate the exchange of riches
"No sector of the economy can get stranded; all the necessary monetary
. .
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of keeping their collective heads in a bag, but if so, you have neglected to note the thoroughness of the obfuscation, various strata of which date from 1863, or 1873, or 1920.
The w^ork of the Vanguard Press in flooding America with cheap editions of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin might have been harmless, might even have been useful, had the Americans known their own history. But they have not known their own history; do not know it, and are not in the process of learning it.
As to their learning anything from their papers . . . they have been and are being served by men who sell news that is wanted. Unwanted news just doesn't "sell. "
Rip van Wendell Willkie reads, and has read, the same news sheet as Roosevelt and Morgenthau . . . that is to say, he is pre-conditioned by news-baths carefully prepared by Reuters, Havas, etc. . . . namely, by the propaganda of Rothschild, Lazard and the rest of the most poisonous dregs of humanity. This has been going on for some time.
If Japan gets a "bum" deal, it will be due quite as much to the American people's real ignorance as to any ill-will or even to the blind greed of a minority.
Boak Carter has tried to tell 'em (the Americans) some of the story. The more cats he lets out, the more difficulty he has of getting any time on the air, or of even holding a column.
A quite dear old friend writes me that she is not exactly praying, but concentrating her will every evening to stop Hitler (about whom she knows nothing). She is not a venomous woman and she likes German opera.
A quite bright New York journalist thinks 1 am in danger of being imprisoned here in Italy for the sentiments expressed in a quotation which I have had stamped on my writing paper. He does not recognize the quota- tion as being a motto of Mussolini, despite the fact that it is followed by the "m" now used all over this country to indicate citations from the writings or speeches of II Duce. The quotation is: "liberty is not a right but a duty. "
You Japanese are said to be very ingenious. Go on. Invent something. Find me a mental gimlet that will let a squirt of light into the indubitably active "minds" of America. "Listen-in to Tokyo! " Yes, brother. And the sooner Tokyo starts telling the American people its own history, i. e. the history of
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the U. S. A. , the sooner the American people will find out. For, of their own motion and initiative, they are not finding it out.
God alone knows what we Americans know of Japan. None of us reads Japanese. Some tens of and hundreds of thousands of us can read German, French and Italian.
Note to your own honor that Italy billed their taking of Somaliland as the FIRST time the British Empire had lost a colony. Spain said, "the first time in 300 years. " A day later came Japanese opinion to the effect that it was the first time since the American Revolution, when we Yanks took out 13 colonies all at once!
And of course Mr. Willkie won't hear of Europe in American papers, for the very good reason that a year ago only five of them were running at a profit. That means that the rest were on borrowed money.
Hence one smiles when Mr. Roosevelt talks about a free press. A newspaper in the U. S. A. is free to print what its creditors and advertisers want printed. I doubt if any American daily paper will go deeply into the merits of, let us say, canned food in America.
A journalist whom I respect very considerably once described to me an interview with his owner; the latter saying: "What do you think you are, a sort of ambassador? Do you know what runs this paper? Do you know what paysforyourkeep? Women'sunderwear! "When1 wasinLondonin November, 1938, a friend saw about 20 people arrested for demonstrating against the reception of Carol of Rumania, who was, however, given the full front page of a pictorial daily with the heading "A Regular Fellow," com- plete in opera cloak and boiled shirt.
An explanation of British and American dailies will convince you of the importance of certain advertisements.
The last poster that caught my eye on the way to Victoria station was: if CHRIST CAME TO LONDON. He hasn't.
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I keep on saying that it is very hard for one people to understand any other. People do not define their terms. The injunction is fairly old . . . but even if people attempt to do so, they do not realize how little certain words mean to men who are not accustomed to using them or who have not got used to their meanings.
The continent of Europe is full of talk about '' Qxiiavchm" translated as "autarchy. " It would save a lot of American and English time if they would translate this word as "the right to keep out of debt. "
Scoundrels are often men who do not want the public to have its time saved. If they are working a swindle, they do not want the public to find it out UNTIL they have got away with the swag. Hence the very great non- receptivity in the news "service" or system run by usuriocracy and mono- polists.
Henry Adams warned his brother Brooks Adams that he might be martyred. Brooks didn't much care, and he died at a ripe old age, but the public is still nearly unaware of his books, in especial of The Law o/ C\v\\\zQ{\or\ and Yiecay and T\\e Ne\N Empire.
I know of no American author from whom the Tokyo reader can learn so much Occidental history from so small a number of pages. Go to it. Pirate him. Read him. Perhaps men who read him in 1897 and 1903 found him less lively than you will, reading him now. He was not a fanatical monetary reformer or insister on monetary pact and the known history of money, as is your present correspondent, but he had covered most of the rest of the ground. He knew and said very plainly that the old Roman empire flopped because it failed to protect the purchasing power of agricultural labor. Italian agriculture was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from Egypt.
I doubt if any author has formulated so many of the bases of empire. The root of sane government is Confucius and Mencius; but the formulae are not fully exposed.
In the stress of the present Anglo-Jewish war on Europe the term "vaJuta-Javoro" has emerged in Italy. That is one sign of Italian strength and sanity. So far as I know. Brooks Adams was unknown in Italy, and General J. F. C. Fuller is among his very rare English readers. Certain facts re-emerge, certain laws continue to be independently rediscovered by people who have never come into contact with records of them.
You find Hitler almost quoting Confucius; you find Mussolini almost citing Jefferson. The answers to the statal problem are known. Every time a dynasty has endured for three centuries we find certain laws at its base. You
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must defend the purchasing power of labor, in especial, of agricultural labor.
B. Adams starts sanely with the antithesis: money-lender and peasant. Whether the Orient has learned anything from the effects of Indian usury, I do not know. Every now and again we get a gleam, that is, three or four lines of print, showing a very acute sense of money, both in Japan and in China. Perhaps your records have not been so often and so successfully destroyed as have those of the Occident.
***
It may even be that my original intention in this article is unnecessary. I started to warn you against accepting "shop-fronts. " The European press is full of talk about Reynauds, Blums, Pierlots, Churchills, all of whom are labels pasted over the very solid facts of the firms running the gold ex- change in London, the Bank of England, the Banque de France. I suppose the name Sassoon has a meaning in Tokyo, or at least across the water, in Shanghai. You may have a more immediate contact with the reality than have the London and Paris neighbors of Sieff (Moses Israel), Melchett, Lazard, etc.
As no American seems to know whom Mr. Morgenthau bought the ten billion of gold from, perhaps some Oriental will have the ingenuity and patience to start finding out. No one would be more delighted by full and detailed information on this point than would your present correspondent. I havebeenthrougheightvolumesofU. S. Treasuryreportsbuttheymerely say how much, never from whom.
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
The radio this morning (July 17) announced fusion of Oriental and Occidental cultures as part of the new Japanese program. Hardshell con- servatives will fear a general discoloration of culture, the sudden accept- ance of the faults of both cultures, such, indeed, as Fenollosa found im- minent years ago and withstood. A serious fusion means rigorous selection of the best works of both hemispheres and an historiography that shall give the most pregnant facts with greatest clarity of definition.
I can, I believe, claim something like seniority, or at any rate a long diligence in the search for the former. At fifteen I started an examination of international literature for my own needs. And from 1910 onward there is
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printedrecordofmyresults,howeverimperfect. I havehadalittlecol- laboration. Eliot hov^ever gave up his Sanskrit. Bunting learned to write a beautiful Persian hand. Aldington remained inside the language groups I had examined. Prof. Breasted thought my idea of a quarterly publication of such results of American research as attained value as literature, that is such as had more than specialist's philological interest, was "a dream floating above the heads of the people. " By which he meant the American University system wherein he held very high status as Assyriologist. I see no reason for Japan's taking over the stupidities and flat failures of Amer- ican scholarship. Tokyo has the liveliest magazine of young letters in the world (VOU). New York once had it, that was twenty years ago. Paris often had it before then. Editorial Yunque of Barcelona has just started a very good bilingual series of poets (Poesia en la Mano) beginning with J. R. Masoliver's excellent translations from Dante, Spanish text facing the origi- nal.
If I recommend eight volumes of my own essays and anthologies to the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai as a starting point, it is not, as might be sup- posed,fromimmodesty,butsimplybecauseI donotknowofanyother30 years or 40 years persistent effort to sort out the Occidental books most worth attention. There are encyclopedias, compilations giving names of ALL the known writings, etc. , but not attempts to show the best books in relation to each other.
The very great labors of the Leo Frobenius Institute cover a different field. Your universities will of course take note of them.
The hang-together of art and the economic system is not yet very generally understood. I keep insisting that an "epic is a poem containing history. " That may explain why epic poets need to know economics. It does not touch the lyric writers so closely. However, a "fusion or union of cultures" implies a mutual regard for two historiographies. Here your universities can save their students a great deal of time by importing Brooks Adams' The Law of CiviJization and Decay and The New Empire.
I think, in fact, that you might start your study of our new historiogra- phy from those books, though to understand American cycles they must be amplified by brief compendia of the writing of the American founders, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, and by a narrative containing facts which I, personally, have found in Overholser, Woodward, Beard, Bowers, and not (oh very emphatically not) in the text books used in American beaneries.
I cannot condense four of the essential factors further than I have already done in my "Introductory Text-book" offered herewith.
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Introductory Text-book [In Four Chapters]
Chap. 1. "All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor and virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. "--John Adams.
Chap. 2. ". . . and if the national bills issued, be bottomed (as is indispens- able] on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no inter- est on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to everyone of the purposes of the metallic money withdrawn and replaced by them. " --Thomas Jefferson (1816, letter to Crawford).
Chap. 3. ". . . and gave to the people of this Republic the greatest blessing THEY EVER HAD--THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS. "--Abraham Lincolu.
Chap. 4. "The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin, and to fix the standards of weights and measures. " Constitution of the United States, Article I Legislative Depart- ment, Section 8, p. 5. Done in the convention by the unanimous consent of the States, 7th September, 1787, and of the Independence of the United States the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names. --GeorgeWashington,PresidentandDeputyfromVirginia.
This "text" was followed by a half page of notes and bibliography. Thus:
The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignor- ance mentioned in my first quotation. Of the three preceding cita- tions, Lincoln's has become the text of Willis Overholser's recent History of Money in the U. S. ; the first citation was taken as opening text by Jerry Voorhis in his speech in the House of Representatives June 6, 1938; and the passage from Jefferson is the nucleus of my Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
Douglas' proposals are a subhead under the main idea in Lin- coln's sentence; Gesell's "invention" is a special case under Jeffer- son's general law. I have done my best to make simple summaries and clear definitions in various books and pamphlets and recommend as introductory study, apart from C. H. Douglas' Economic Democracy and Gesell's Natural Economic Order, Chris. HoUis' Two Nations, McNair Wilson's Promise to Pay, Larraiiaga's Gold, Glut and Govern- ment and M. Butchart's compendium of three centuries' thought, that is an anthology of what has been said, in Money. (Originally pub- lished by Nott. )
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There again I have nothing to retract. I left copies of the above work with a number of senators and congressmen last year in Washington, also with a few historians. The more they knew already, the more nearly saw the bearing of my four chapters. I doubt if anyone can further, or to advantage condense, the thought of John Adams than I have in Cantos 62/71, and I have made a start on Jefferson in my Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Both of which volumes can be explained. There is no reason for someone in Tokyo refraining from issuing a commentary, but I doubt if an adequate history of the U. S. can be written without including the essential ideas which I have there set together. The compendia of histoire morale contempomine made by Remy de Gourmont and Henry James, I have at least indicated in my Make it New.
At this point I would offer a word of warning to Japanese alumni of American, or other Occidental universities. With the exception of Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut in Frankfurt, our universities are not, they most emphatically are not, in the foreguard of Western thought. There is a time lag of 20, 40 or 60 years in what they teach in economics, history and literature. They may be more lively in departments of material science. At any rate most of their Japanese alumni were taught ideas belonging to Western decadence. And that decadence was nowhere more notable than in Western tendency to erect museums rather than temples.
Now the museum is all very well in its way. The juvenile student can see bits and pieces of what has been achieved in the past, which may keep him from narrow provincialism both of place and of time.
In the study of comparative literature, T. S. Eliot has acutely observed that, "existing masterworks constitute a plenum, whereof the divers parts have inter-related proportions and values. The relations of extant works are modified by new work that is really new. "
It is also true that the real writers of any epoch collaborate, sometimes consciously and voluntarily, sometimes unconsciously and even against their own will.
Yeats and I collaborated voluntarily. Yeats and F. M. (Hueffer) Ford involuntarily. Cummings is possibly unconscious of collaboration, etc. However, a museum is made up of fragments. An attempt to present the literature of a country or continent is bound to appear fragmentary or at least made up of heteroclite matter of different degrees of importance. Even more so when we come to translated literature. There is no uniform merit in translations, any more than in works. One nation may have an epic. An- other a set of plays. But one dimension is common to all masterworks,
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namely, they contain the quintessence of racial quality. I have seen Villon in Paris 500 years after his lines were written.
I have seen Boccaccio and Goldoni in Italy, and it is commonplace that "London is full of Dickens. " By which laconic phrases one means that the "news" printed by these authors is still the event of the day in their countries.
Whatever I have compiled either in essays or in anthologies has been in an attempt to set together maxima of achievement, that is, work in which at least some of the qualities of writing and concept have attained the highest known degree. And my results are I think largely confirmed by the findings of England's most distinguished resident critic, T. S. Eliot (born American). And to a certain extent I think Yeats and F. M. Ford would have agreed with us, however long it may take the literary bureaucracies and the book trade to admit it. In several cases even the book-trade has had to give way 20 or 25 years after the fact.
I am therefore recommending my own finding re comparative litera- ture. I am recommending Brooks Adams and subsequent "new" economists in the field of history. I have elsewhere cited various other compendia. Germany is talking of Karl von Stein and of Ruhland instead of Marx. The thought of an epoch does not present itself in all departments. La Tour du Pin, Fabre, Frazer, Burbank, may seem names picked up at hazard. Strictly scientific names are world-known--it is only when you get to the border- line between material (practical) science and culture that the vital writers may lie hidden for half a century before coming into their own.
In the fields of history or economics the vital writers may be half absorbed and super- seded before being known to more than three hundred readers. After which they crop up again later as "sources," the "source" for practical purposes having very little importance save for retrospective scholars, very little, that is, in proportion to the immense importance of getting the right solu- tion, whether for an anti-tubercular serum, or for an economic (monetary) process.
John Adams remarked that "very few people have the chance to choose their system of government. " It is extremely difficult to make a thorough reform of studies that have become fixed or waterlogged through a century or more of university habit. There is, on the other hand, a grand chance of effecting an up-to-date system, if you deliberately set out to present a relatively unexplored foreign culture, and can do so without superstitions, at any rate looking clearly at definite facts either established or provable, and not caring a hang whether these facts have been acceptable to the controllers of the educational [videlicet mis-educational or obfuscatory)
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system in the countries which you elect to investigate.
If Japan can produce a better, that is clearer and more incisive, set of
brochures showing the real thought of the founders of America's social form, than now exists in America, so much the greater your glory. The best and most revolutionary book on Botticelli was brought out by one of your citizens. It was, or at least appeared to me to be, extremely original in its treatment of Botticelli's details as comparable with Oriental treatments. The impartial and alien eye really saw what the familiar native eye had taken for granted. So much for suggested imports to Japan. When it comes to exports, we in the Occident wonder whether a Japanese history exists; or at any rate we fear that no translation of your history exists that will tell us as much of Japan as the tong-kien-kang-mou in De Moyriac de Mailla's version tells us of China. You can't order such works over night. De Mailla's French makes literature of even rather dull passages. Klaproth's Nippon o Dai Itsi Ran does not. It is merely well printed. We want to know more about you. There is a gap between Kagekiyo and the new dredger-plus plywood veneers.
What I really know of Japan I have got from Fenollosa's notes on the Noh and from a handful of "very much over-civilized" young men to whom the Noh was familiar. I cannot suppose this to be a "working knowledge" but I believe it to be a much more "real" knowledge than I should have got by starting at the "practical end" and omitting the fragments vouch-safed to me.
In struggling against enormous odds (meaning financial odds) for a mutual understanding between Japan and the Occident, there is still the danger that a Japanese educated in the U. S. A. might occasionally believe a statement printed in English or American newspapers without first looking carefully at the date line, and name of the agency supplying said news. It cannot be too firmly understood that "some" agencies and newspapers exist mainly, or even wholly, for the purpose of causing the stock markets to wobble, their "political" purposes being a mere cover for this means to putrid profit. I personally feel that some of you might get your European news via the U. S. A. even if as many of your students have gone to Germany
(have they? ) as to the U. S. A. Re which possibility I register the simple statement made to me two years ago by an American publisher. (Parenth- esis: my friends often urge me to be "reasonable. ") The publisher said: "Facts unfavorable to Germany and Italy are news; facts favorable to Italy and Germany are propaganda. "
Against which I set a revealing statement made by Otto Dietrich (Ter- ramare pamphlets no. 13): "The Fiihrer will never create an office unless
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thoroughly convinced of the suitability of the person selected for it. " Perhaps the spiritual descendents and unconscious followers of Con- fucius do him more honor than physical descendents who spend their time
borrowing money.
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
It is impossible to explain contemporary Europe to Japan without a long economic preface, possibly a longer preface than the average reader has patience for. One can roughly indicate the cycle of Occidental infamies since the founding of the Bank of England about 1696 A. D. , via the suppres- sion of paper money in England's American colonies, Cobbett's struggles against the ruin of agriculture in England, industrialization, the ruin of land owners by financial chicane, etc. Suffice it to say that by 1935 we were all fed up with the fall of empires, kingdoms, etc. It was all "old stuff. " Governments had flopped, Austria was, later, a minor collapse, but for over a century and a quarter no man had laid hands on a Rothschild. That item was NEWS with a big "N," but not one European journalist in a hundred had sense to know it, and not one in a thousand could print his perception if he had one. Three hundred million or whatever golden schillings or whatever had gone into Skoda gun works, to make trouble, via Vienna. The reply was the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich.
In one sense history, not merely ideological history, is built out of phrases. It is built out of crystallizations of words into very brief groups, say five, six, or a dozen words. These words become fact. And it is impossible to exaggerate their force, because they cannot come into existence save as proof of a state of understanding. I mean clear understanding, not mere confused apprehension or suspicion.
Hjaimar Schacht made history in 1938: "GeJd, dem keine Ver- brauchsgiiter gegeniiberstehen, ist ja nichts als bedriicktes Papier. " Money that isn't issued against commerciable goods is mere printed paper.
Of course you have to know quite a bit of economics to understand why this sentence is history. Aristotle left certain terms undefined, or at any rate failed to "educate" the Occident and give it a clear (when I say clear, I mean clear) understanding of certain properties of money. Some people contin- ued to think of money as "a universally accepted commodity delivered in measured amounts. " By 640 A. D. the Tang dynasty had got round to using paper money, that is, "an admonition or memorandum of how much the
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187
holder of a certain kind of piece of paper ought to receive in the common market. " The inscription of the Tang notes is essentially the same as that on the ten lire notes in Italy today.
Then came the word "credit. " By 1623 the Sienese Bank, the Monte dei Paschi, had discovered the basis of sound credit, namely the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people. Jefferson knev^^ that it was unnecessary for the U. S. Government to pay two dollars (out of the people's pocket) for every dollar's worth of goods or services delivered to the government. In other words he knew that the state need not rent its own credit from a clique of individuals either American or foreign. Nevertheless even today men go on confusing mandates or orders to deliver what exists and promises to hand over something which may exist next year or the year after. I hope the Japanese student will find two words, one for each of these paper implements, and then refrain from using the two words indifferently and confusedly. If you do this, the Occident will come to sit at your feet.
In the meantime, very informative work is being printed in Italy. I need hardly say that the Axis Powers are the most interesting phenomena in the Occident at this moment, A. D. 1940, year of the Fascist Era xviii. Gerarchia, a monthly magazine founded by Mussolini, contains on p. 345, the month current, the words "probJemi economici, cioe sociali" ("Economic prob- lems, that is to say social").
This also is history. It shows the final penetration of a whole realm of ideas that scattered economists and reformers have been hammering at, and trying to hammer into the public mind for the past 20 years.
There is, indeed, need for a drastic and burning revision of the rubbish taught in all Western universities in the departments of history and eco- nomics. Beginning with Brooks Adams the live thought of half a century runs through authors who are practically excluded--I mean 100% (one hundred per cent) excluded--from the frousty beaneries of the U. S. A. , England, etc. C. H. Douglas, Gesell, Chris. Mollis, McNair Wilson, Over- holser, Larraiiaga, Butchart's compendium, do not figure among the au- thors revealed to our students. An Italian minority, chiefly non- universitaire, I should say, is served by a flock of periodicals which do treat these subjects, often in an "unreadable" manner. However, as you are enjoying a new Italo-Japanese amity society, you might do worse than to fill its reading room with copies of Gerarchia, Rivista deJ Lavoro and publica- tions of this sort. G. Pellizzi is now editing Civilta Fascista, but for brevity's sake it is now possible to make a short cut via Odon Por's Finanza Nuova,
an 80-page summary of new financial ideas (published by Le Monnier, Firenze, 10 lire). Apart from brief restatement of ideas and experiments
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elsewhere, the opening pages of this book give the clearest, and for the first time so far as I know, an adequate statement of the basic differences of theory, and, be it said, the superiorities of Corporate State finance over other proposals and experiments. You cannot understand the new Europe without knowledge of the Italian Fascist revolution and you cannot under- stand that revolution without distinguishing two components in it: the men who, led by Mussolini, regenerated Italy, and the men who, seeing that they could not prevent the regeneration, went along with it for what they could make out of it. Por is distinctly in the first group.
"There had been retouches, but not root changes, because the state intervention did not get down to bed rock, but left the hegemony to preda- tory groups. "
"Autarchy set going as constructive reply to the disintegrating power of money-ocracy, was quickly seen by the latter to be a deadly attack, to be
resisted by all means whatsoever, including war.
". . . . it is at any rate clear that it is not the national aggregates that are
fighting . . . but financial cliques prodding the peoples to fight. "
"Why does Plutocracy fight autarchy? " asks Por.
"In the first place autarchy aims at producing enough goods for national
needs. Money no longer dictates production, but an autarchic-cooperative order does the dictating and money depends on this order for its volume and value. "
I wonder if I can translate that sentence any more clearly? Por goes on:
"In short, the cooperative autarchy abolishes money as merchandise as it has abolished labor as merchandise. "
The Italian word is merce. We might say: Under autarchia neither money nor labor [is] something a clique can sweat profits out of.
"The state having established its rule over the economic system ex- tends this rule over the financial. "
"If you consider that the Bank of England is owned by international financiers who are very hard to identify, and that the British Government has not the power to direct the bank's actions always and everywhere; and that the Banque de France is owned by private capitalists and that many seats on its board of directors are, as it were, hereditary in the plutocratic families: Rothschild, Neuflize, Hottinguer, Wendel, Duchemin, etc. who control the key industries, including the arms business, you can measure the meaning of the reorganization of the Banca d'ltalia. "
"It has become really national because no international interest can get
to work inside it.
. " . .
. " . .
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"The credit of a corporatively organized country is limited to its real riches. "
"These consist in its physical resources in their natural state bettered by modern processes of labor, plus the vital activities of the population and the state of the sciences; of the culture and the intellectual and moral education of the people and the efficient ordering of its institutions. The true wealth is not money. Money is the means accepted to actuate produc-
. "
means to develop the nation's wealth will be provided without having resource to foreign financings. "
All this may seem to be nothing but very plain common sense. Japan may have arrived at this state of sanity and progressed beyond it, for all I know. But you may take it from me that Europe, in general, had not done so by September last year. Even among the bright reformers in various "pro- gressive sectors" such as the U. S. A. (New Deal); Alberta (Social Credit, sabotaged by Monty Norman and the London bleeders); New Zealand (amply reviewed by Por in a later chapter of his Finanza Nuova), some of the essential parts of the mechanism had been omitted.
It is for the above very simple ideas that the Axis Powers are fighting against mouldy superstition. That much you can take as news item, whether you agree with me or not, as to the value of the ideas in themselves.
12 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
Japan is to be congratulated on bringing Mr. Matsuoka to her Foreign Office. Having sat at Geneva he knows just how rotten the League was. He knows to anatomthekindofswindlerwhomadeit. Heknowsthementalitythatwas in it, and is in the Carnegie peace swindle. He knows to what degree the latter sniveling gang of pacifists has refrained from using its endowments honestly and how well it has blocked any research into the real causes of war. And this knowledge of his might be of world use.
Funk's plan is a complete answer to the infamies proposed by Streit and Co. But that doesn't mean that Funk's plan will get any adequate publicity in America. You might think it would . . . you might think my compatriots would be able to see the sense of collaborating in a new world order instead
tion and stimulate the exchange of riches
"No sector of the economy can get stranded; all the necessary monetary
. .
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of keeping their collective heads in a bag, but if so, you have neglected to note the thoroughness of the obfuscation, various strata of which date from 1863, or 1873, or 1920.
The w^ork of the Vanguard Press in flooding America with cheap editions of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin might have been harmless, might even have been useful, had the Americans known their own history. But they have not known their own history; do not know it, and are not in the process of learning it.
As to their learning anything from their papers . . . they have been and are being served by men who sell news that is wanted. Unwanted news just doesn't "sell. "
Rip van Wendell Willkie reads, and has read, the same news sheet as Roosevelt and Morgenthau . . . that is to say, he is pre-conditioned by news-baths carefully prepared by Reuters, Havas, etc. . . . namely, by the propaganda of Rothschild, Lazard and the rest of the most poisonous dregs of humanity. This has been going on for some time.
If Japan gets a "bum" deal, it will be due quite as much to the American people's real ignorance as to any ill-will or even to the blind greed of a minority.
Boak Carter has tried to tell 'em (the Americans) some of the story. The more cats he lets out, the more difficulty he has of getting any time on the air, or of even holding a column.
A quite dear old friend writes me that she is not exactly praying, but concentrating her will every evening to stop Hitler (about whom she knows nothing). She is not a venomous woman and she likes German opera.
A quite bright New York journalist thinks 1 am in danger of being imprisoned here in Italy for the sentiments expressed in a quotation which I have had stamped on my writing paper. He does not recognize the quota- tion as being a motto of Mussolini, despite the fact that it is followed by the "m" now used all over this country to indicate citations from the writings or speeches of II Duce. The quotation is: "liberty is not a right but a duty. "
You Japanese are said to be very ingenious. Go on. Invent something. Find me a mental gimlet that will let a squirt of light into the indubitably active "minds" of America. "Listen-in to Tokyo! " Yes, brother. And the sooner Tokyo starts telling the American people its own history, i. e. the history of
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the U. S. A. , the sooner the American people will find out. For, of their own motion and initiative, they are not finding it out.
God alone knows what we Americans know of Japan. None of us reads Japanese. Some tens of and hundreds of thousands of us can read German, French and Italian.
Note to your own honor that Italy billed their taking of Somaliland as the FIRST time the British Empire had lost a colony. Spain said, "the first time in 300 years. " A day later came Japanese opinion to the effect that it was the first time since the American Revolution, when we Yanks took out 13 colonies all at once!
